As you are aware the country is now in the midst of the massive social exercise of coping with Corona Virus. Normal Societal patterns are changing and a widespread move to homeworking is having a dramatic impact on the countries voice and data networks.

As a result, all organisations will potentially experience issues with voice and data congestion - this may manifest itself as poor call quality, slower internet connectivity or even a total loss of service for short periods. Please be patient and appreciate that all players in the industry as working at full capacity to support continuation of services.

All carriers have now declared an MBORC situation (Matter Beyond Our Reasonable Control). This means that all Service Level Agreements are essentially suspended, and all issues will be addressed on a ‘Best Efforts’ basis. The Carriers themselves are now also suffering staff shortages. As a result, new orders are being suspended if they require on site engineering. Faults will be prioritised according to the following guidelines.

1.     Bluelight services

2.     Critical national infrastructure

3.     Welfare customers

4.     Covid-19 at risk

5.     Customers with no service – repair (total loss of service) and provisioning (new line where none exist)

6.     Customers with significantly degraded service

7.     Customers with intermittent service

8.     Other repair and provisioning jobs

Unfortunately, this inevitably means that many issues will effectively not be resolved in the short term.

It may be necessary for example to find other ways around an issue using technologies such as 4G Routers to re-establish connectivity.